On March 14 (2007) the Berlage Insti­tute (Rot­ter­dam) hosted two lec­tures with the title “Instant City: The Rise of Dubai”. Kees Chris­ti­aanse (Archi­tect, Rot­ter­dam) and George Katodry­tis (Archi­tect, Dubai) gave pre­sen­ta­tions while Roemer van Toorn mod­er­ated the event. Marc Angélil unfor­tu­nately was stuck at the Zurich air­port because of the infa­mous Swiss weather.

Dubai is a gated com­mu­nity. What can we do about it? And can archi­tec­ture polit­i­cally engage a global market-​driven power structure?

Kees answered, that Dubai is dom­i­nated by “gatedness”, “sameness”, “fadedness” and “maleness”.

He dis­tin­guishes two types of gat­ed­ness: Gated Com­mu­ni­ties, and Public Space in the form of shop­ping malls. The Dubai Water­front Project has almost no public space. The front garden, the back garden and the back beach are all pri­va­tized. Streets are with­out side­walks. They become iso­lated islands, only acces­si­ble by pri­vate boat. This will lead to closed cities lack­ing any form of social inter­ac­tion. The notion of a free and open city will exist no longer. Wel­come to the resort.
Roemer van Toorn raised the provoca­tive ques­tion: What is so bad about same­ness? The people obvi­ously want it! Kees replied that homo­gene­ity cre­ates bore­dom which is inher­ently bad.

He appealed to the architect’s morals of not simply imple­ment­ing Euro­pean models with­out giving the Dubai con­text a second thought. He even started a “No Hol­land Vil­lage” cam­paign in reac­tion to a new Dutch-​style set­tle­ment in Dubai. Don’t get me wrong, archi­tects copy and paste anyhow, and rightly so, as long as con­text and his­tory are con­sid­ered. Fol­low­ing only market requests and con­tribut­ing to a homo­ge­neous mass soci­ety is not the role of an archi­tect who has a social responsibility.

Chris­ti­aanse com­pares Dubai to Los Ange­les; hence the ini­tial posi­tion of Dubai as iso­lated deserts with­out reg­u­la­tions was sim­i­lar. Local inhab­i­tants make up only 10% of con­tem­po­rary Dubai’s pop­u­la­tion, whereas the rest of the people are aliens – ser­vice per­son­nel, tourists and working-​class trades people. This inhibits iden­tity or authen­tic­ity of a place: Dubai is made for tourists and will be very suc­cess­ful at it.

George Katodry­tis is much more opti­mistic about the new devel­op­ments; he works with an adven­tur­ous spirit in the con­text. He describes the Dubai Water­front devel­op­ment and its gigan­tic dimen­sions. He believes that the archi­tect needs to follow the rules of the market. And he and his stu­dents try to find the spaces where it is still pos­si­ble to inter­vene. But his dis­course unwit­tingly showed the ulti­mate pow­er­less­ness of the architect.

But who is making Dubai?
We know that (see “What I have achieved for Dubai is only 10% of my Vision for it.“) Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Mak­toum, Prime Min­is­ter of the United Arab Emi­rates, is mainly respon­si­ble for the devel­op­ment. He built up a total­i­tar­ian system with a selected core of highly edu­cated advi­sors (Har­vard, AA, and so forth) and has the money and power to push this extreme vision through.

Dubai becomes real­ity in the absence of democracy.